Support Our Troops

Hobs has requested that we all write about the meaninglessness of the phrase “Support our troops,” which I am all too happy to do. We live in an age of meaningless words and phrases. “Patriotic,” for instance. What happened to the days when being patriotic meant more than waving an American flag and voting Republican? Then there’s “Right to Life.” Hobs so aptly compared the notion of supporting the troops to that of “the right to life.” When I was growing up in North Carolina in the heyday of Jesse Helms’s Senatorial rule, the handful of people in the state who didn’t support him came up with this great bumper sticker: “Jesse Helms: right to life from conception to birth.” And I’d love to see how many of these people who so vehemently believe in the rights of a fetus would eagerly tune into a televised execution of someone like Charles Manson, big bowls of popcorn in their laps to accompany the evening’s entertainment.

I also love the way everything is turned into a “war.” We have the “drug war.” Am I the only person in the world who thinks that sounds like a war over who gets the drug? “The War on Terror” would be extremely amusing, if these words weren’t being used to strip away people’s rights and to condone torture. Those who most love to use the phrase seem to be incapable of seeing the irony in the fact that they’re doing their damnedest to strike terror in every citizen’s heart, keeping the American public in a perpetually frightened and uncertain state, so they can do whatever the hell they want. Of course, when we’re actually doing something that looks extremely war-like: sending our armed forces over seas with tanks and weapons, well, that’s not a war, that’s just an operation, as in “Operation Desert Storm.”

What does it mean, then, in this day and age of meaningless phrases to "support our troops?" It's a good question. Anyone who knows me doesn’t have to wonder how I stand on this evil endless war in Iraq. Unlike many a politician in this country, I’ve been unapologetically opposed to it from day one. That does not mean I’m opposed to getting rid of malicious, inhumane dictators. I just want to know, if that’s our mission, why we aren’t busy getting rid of all the other evil dictators in the world. It also does not mean you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who is more concerned about the poor young men and women over there fighting a war that will get them absolutely nothing once they come home (if they do come home). The travesty of war in this day and age is that those who make the decisions are not the ones getting blown to bits in a foreign land. I’d have been all in favor of this war if Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld had been the ones to march in there themselves to fight for their all-so-important oil. So, I’ll let you judge. Do I not “support our troops,” because I feel extraordinary empathy and pain for the young soldiers laying their lives on the line and want them all to come home now? Would I be someone who “supports our troops” if I felt not an ounce of empathy or pain were Bush and Co. to be blown up due to their own greed and hunger for power?

I’m tagging you if you’re reading this: please post on “support our troops.”